A fat concierge, whose bulged and gaping clothes gave her the aspect of an over-ripe fruit, slept stonily in a chair at the doorway. Rufin was not certain whether Musard lived on the fourth floor or the fifth, and would have been glad to inquire, but he had not the courage to prod that slumbering bulk, and was careful to edge past without touching it. The grimy stair led him upward to find out for himself.
On the third floor, according to his count, a door looked like what he remembered of Musard's, but it yielded no answer to his knocking. A flight higher there was another which stood an inch or so ajar, and this he ventured to push open that he might look in. It yielded him a room empty of life, but he remained in the doorway looking.
It was a commonplace, square, ugly room, the counterpart of a hundred others in that melancholy building; but its window, framing a saw- edged horizon of roofs and chimneys, faced to the north, and some one, it was plain, had promoted it to the uses of a studio. An easel stood in the middle of the floor with a canvas upon it; the walls were covered with gross caricatures drawn upon the bare plaster with charcoal. A mattress and some tumbled bedclothes lay in one corner, and a few humble utensils also testified that the place was a dwelling as well as a workshop.
Rufin looked back to be sure that no one was coming up the stairs, and then tiptoed into the room to see what hung on the easel.
"After all," he murmured, "an artist has the right."
The picture on the easel was all but completed; it was a quarter- length painting of a girl. Stepping cautiously around the easel, he came upon a full view of it suddenly, and forthwith forgot all his precautions to be unheard. Here was a thing no man could keep quiet! With his first glance he saw—he, himself a painter, a creator, a judge—that he stood in the presence of a great work of art, a vision, a power.
"But here!" he exclaimed amazedly. "Of all places—here!"
The painted face looked out at him with all the sorrowful wisdom that is comprised in a life sharpened on the grindstone of a remorseless civilization. It was a girl such as one might find anywhere in that neighborhood, she had the hardy prettiness, the alertness, the predatory quality which belong to wild creatures civilized by force. It was set on the canvas with a skill that made Rufin smile with frank pleasure; but the skill, the artifice of the thing, were the least part of it. What was wonderful was the imagination, the living insight, that represented not only the shaped product of a harsh existence, but the womanhood at the root of it. It was miraculous; it was convincing as life is convincing; it was great.
Rufin, the painter whose fame was secure, upon whom Art had showered gifts, gazed at it, absorbed and reverent. He realized that in this picture his age had achieved a masterpiece; he was at least the contemporary of an immortal.
"Ah!" he said, with an impulse of high indignation. "And while he paints here and sleeps on the floor, they buy my pictures!"